And in the same issue, this newspaper was in wrathful hysterics over the refereeing of Jonathan Kaplan in Dublin. If you read between the lines, Mr Kaplan was not only grossly incompetent, if not exactly bent, he was extremely partial.

How could Ireland give away a mere four penalties in the entire match? Why was only one side being refereed etcetera?

It has been a pretty common theme among the game's "progressives." England were robbed in Ireland. A lot of people, we now conclude, want it both ways.

England would have gained a famous victory against arguably the best team in this hemisphere had it not been for one confused South African with a whistle. Yet at the same time England are held to be in steep decline.

Which is it to be? Bad team or bad ref? There's some very selective interpretation going on here and other pretty nasty un- rugby things besides.

Colin High, the Rugby Football Union's referees manager, has gone into print with his doubts of Mr Kaplan's sound judgment, or lack of it, and the force of his conclusions might make some wonder if the match official was guilty of bringing the game into disrepute.

Others, me included, are tempted to believe that it is Mr High who has done rugby a disservice. Since when have we countenanced referees slamming other referees in public?

By tacit, respected, agreement down all the years, while referees might well be sightless nitwits, we have accepted that we must never say so, not publicly, anyway. The referee's word is law, he shall not be argued with and we have played the game accordingly for a very long time.

Now we have referees denigrating each other in newspapers and can't you feel the reverberations as another sacred principle of rugby football goes down the Swanee?

There are coaches, directors of rugby, who earn extreme RFU displeasure for venting their unfavourable opinions of referees and they are punished accordingly.

One DOR, to whom I speak each week, alleges that there is an inverted pecking order for the referees that Colin High manages: the lower a team are in the league, the worse the referees they are assigned.

I would get him into trouble if I published his name and his complete set of thoughts on this subject - perhaps similar to the action taken against Mr High who did rather more than mutter "ref, you're a prat" after the game.

High has been "formally warned about his future conduct" and provisionally suspended as an international referee assessor. He has also written a letter of apology to Kaplan.

Referees have had bad games (more often than good games, I'd venture) since rugby began and we learned to accept the consequences on the reasonable understanding that it would all even out in the end.

Now we have official whingeing and not even Wales, the most put-upon nation in the history of the game, so they claim, have resorted to that.

The International Rugby Board, certain England luminaries hoped, would become aware of Mr Kaplan's inadequacies and what, we wonder, will the IRB do about that? Issue a stricture? Cancel the result?

Whatever; they're dealing with a precedent, and a very delicate one. So can Wales claim redress for the very worst refereeing decision of all time, that cost them victory over New Zealand in 1978?

Or one of the top ten worst that caused their defeat at Twickenham in 1974?

I shall restrain myself, with difficulty - for once - from going into names and details of the aforementioned incidents but the fact is that the rugby internationals that have been less than perfectly refereed far outnumber those in which official saintliness and flawlessness have prevailed.

Refereeing blunders, regrettable though they may be, are as much a part of rugby as the dropped pass or the accidental offside.

We will never do away with them, not until the day when we do away with referees. And what then?